Angel of Death
by MrsTater
Summary: Elle returns to the Company with a tempting offer for Gabriel. Can he refuse and still give her what she wants? Alternate universe after episode 3.5, Angels and Monsters.
1. Part I

**Part I**

He has his own room now. A real room, with a tidily made up full-sized bed, a nightstand with a lamp he controls, and a dresser and closet for his clothes -- no more institutional pajamas. There's a sitting area with comfortable chairs and shelves of books from his personal library, and even a desk for his watchmaking tools. And, most importantly, there's a bathroom with a _door _so he can satisfy nature's call in private.

If Noah had his way, Gabriel would still be in a cell on Level 5 -- if not in some other dimension, via a vortex. Luckily for him, Noah's _not _in charge and Angela -- his _mother_ -- is.

Not that Gabriel thinks his new living arrangements are the product of maternal affection, or even concern for the well-being of her long-lost son. No, he saw the terror lurking behind her cool mask as she stated, matter-of-factly, that has control of his powers and needn't return to Level 5, that his abilities are too great an asset to the Company to be kept under lock and key.

By _abilities_, he knows she means his immortality. Funny how the one power they'd tried so hard to stop him from taking for himself is their one hope of surviving whatever new villain haunts Angela like the unrelenting vestiges of a nightmare. He chuckles to himself as he peers through magnified lenses at the 1917 German watch that eluded his intuitive aptitude for seven years before he learned to feed his hunger by taking people apart instead of putting timepieces together; he'll have to tell Noah that one -- though of course Noah won't appreciate his twisted sense of irony. Which is what makes it so deeply satisfying to make off-the-cuff remarks like that, to watch him blink and squirm behind those horn-rimmed glasses, like a beetle trapped in a glass jar. Even though part of Gabriel genuinely does wish he had his partner's respect, part of him is truly sorry about what he did to Claire.

Not, he acknowledges, that he'd be likely, reform or no reform, to act any differently if presented with the choice again.

Sighing, he hunches over his desk, inspecting the inner workings of the antique timepiece. But his mind is not on watchmaking. It has turned, as it tends to do so frequently these days, to the unnamed enemy stalking his mother in her dreams. Who does she see? What does he do? And how -- though Gabriel tries not to think it -- does he do it?

Angela won't speak to anyone of what she's seen, but could he see it for himself? Could he paint it? He sets aside the watch and his glasses looks around his room as if expecting it to have turned into Isaac Mendez's loft, where paint and canvass abound. Of course no tools of that trade are at Gabriel's disposal here, and he wonders whether that is deliberate. Probably. While this room provides an illusion of independence and privacy, it lacks anything that might give him knowledge beyond what Angela and Noah feed him; there's not even a TV (though Gabriel's never been much of a television watcher) or a computer. He does, however, have pencils and paper. Maybe a simple sketch will provide the answers he seeks--

A rap on the door startles him as he's opening the desk drawer where yellow legal pads are stored. He withdraws his hand like a boy caught in the act of peeping at his father's hidden stash of _Playboys_, then is disgusted by his own furtiveness. What are they doing to him? He, who has power far and away beyond any of them, is allowing them to deprive him of his freedoms.

He hears the rattle of Angela's manicured nails on the keypad outside the room, followed by the heavy, automated deadbolt turning over within the door. At least Angela has the courtesy not to open the door until Gabriel says "come in" -- unlike Noah, who barges in to say he's got a lead on a new target, as though he sees no difference between this room and the cells on Level 5. And maybe there isn't any.

All the same, Gabriel appreciates Angela, and the way she says his name -- not Sylar -- as she bids him good morning.

"I hope we're not interrupting you."

"Morning...Mom."

_Mom_ is a test, to which Angela does not react. Battling to control his own reaction of squeezing his pencil so tightly that it starts to crack, Gabriel tucks it behind his ear and rises from the straight-backed wooden chair.

"_We_?" he asks.

Angela steps aside to give a young blonde woman entrance into the room. "Of course you remember our former employee, Elle Bishop."

Gabriel swallows as the mere sight of Elle, and the memory of that encounter, shocks his senses. That wonderful _power_...

"How could I forget someone who electrocuted me?"

Though Elle's arms are crossed over her chest in what could be interpreted as a self-protective stance, Gabriel notes the almost defiant tilt of her head and the level gaze with which she meets his. It's not how he expects an almost-victim to look at him; it's definitely not how Claire looks at him. But then, Elle hasn't survived quite as much as Claire.

Or has she?

"Not," Elle says, "'How could I forget someone I tried to scalp'?"

"After you've done it a few times, they all start to blend together."

Instinctively, Gabriel starts to move toward Elle. She doesn't take a step back from him, though the tempo of her beating heart accelerates. His eyes dart sideways, to Angela. Elle's a little unhinged, but Angela's face, at least, should show some concern; she is, after all, the one who first encouraged him to control his urges. To Gabriel's chagrin, Angela looks the most composed he's seen her look in days. _He _takes a step backward, and sideways, positioning himself behind his chair, and curls his fingers over the back.

"It's the ones you can't kill," he says quietly, looking at Elle again, "that you remember."

He's staring at the pale white scar on her forehead when the twitch of her eyebrows diverts his gaze to Elle's. Her eyes are fixed on him in a way that feels almost electric. Is she unleashing her power? Is it the hunger stirring at the memory of it, like an appetite aroused by the smell of food in the oven?

"Why are you here?" Gabriel asks, hoping it will get her, temptation, out of here sooner.

"I'll leave you to your visitor," Angela says, backing from the room. She pauses in the midst of pulling the door closed to look at Elle with open disgust, and Gabriel thinks of when Angela brought Bridget to his cell to feed him. Reeling with panic, he seeks Angela's eye, pleading with his gaze for this not to be a betrayal of the trust he's worked so hard to earn, but she is gone. The door shuts -- and locks -- between them; the click of her stilettos recedes down the hall.

"I'm sorry," says Elle.

Gabriel gapes at her, surprised, and to ask what on earth for. Before he can produce any words, Elle's mouth curls into a smirk.

"Not even psychotic serial killers deserve bitches like Angela Petrelli for mothers."

Doubts about Angela's loyalty slip away as the epithet puts Gabriel on the defensive. "Kind of rich, don't you think, for the daughter of Bob Bishop to criticize anyone's parent?"

Elle's smirk slides downward into a glower, her eyes narrowing on Gabriel. For a second, the room seems to crackle with surging energy; white-knuckled, he grips the back of the chair, as much to brace for the inevitable shock as to stay his hand from reaching out to crack open that pretty head and take such power for himself.

But the blast of energy never comes. Nor does one of Elle's equally stinging retorts.

Gabriel lets out his breath, relaxing. "I suppose..."

He steps around the chair; he can do this, he can control himself to interact normally with special people.

"Growing up in the presence of such highly evolved people as Bob and Angela, you never had to imagine that the family who raised you would turn out to be an adoptive family, that your real parents were out there somewhere, leading lives of power and significance."

Elle looks unimpressed. "Angela has _dreams_."

"And Bob had King Midas' touch."

It's probably not the right thing to do, drawing the pencil from behind his ear and turning it into gold, but Gabriel doesn't think of this until after he's done it and Elle's eyes brim with tears.

Briefly. Blinking them away, she says, "Money makes the world go round," and snatches the pencil from Gabriel before he can react, shoving it into her coat pocket. A curious action. Does she want a memento of her father? Or is she hard up for cash? Surely a man with the Golden Touch left his daughter set for life?

"So..._Gabriel_." Elle arches an eyebrow at him as she strides past him; she knocks shoulders with him, giving Gabriel a little jolt he's not sure is electricity or simply the first human contact he's had in a while. Inspecting his desk, she asks, "Wouldn't 'Angel of Death' fit you a little better?"

"In some traditions, Gabriel is the Angel of Death."

He tenses as Elle's slim, trembling fingers -- is that the current of power coursing through her? -- close around the antique pocket watch and catch it up for inspection. But it's Gabriel at whom she looks with interest. _Just a watchmaker,_ he thinks, ashamed. _An insignificant watchmaker._

"Oh yeah?" says Elle. "Guess I've come to the right place after all. I was a little worried when Angela told me you'd _reformed_."

Smirking, she replaces the watch on the desk. Though relieved the precious timepiece is no longer in her inexperienced -- and dangerous -- hands, Gabriel doesn't relax. He steps around her, consciously avoiding contact with her, and picks up the watch, examining the gears to be sure nothing's gone amiss since he last looked at it. With a racing heart, he thinks of that terrible last day in his mother's apartment, when he'd desperately tried to win her approval and hold on to what was left of Gabriel Gray by repairing his father's old clock.

"I said in some traditions," he growls. "Not mine."

Whatever it is Elle is asking him to do, he won't do it. He's worked too hard, denied himself too much, to lose control again now. He may not be a free man here, but he'll be damned if he's sent back to Level 5--

Elle's laugh cuts the air like a bolt of lighting. "Please. You're only reformed because Mama Petrelli needs you to be. When she's done with you, you'll get over it."

Her hand comes to rest on Gabriel's shoulder. He winces at her touch, though she hasn't shocked him; despite his best efforts not to meet her gaze, he can't help looking into her mocking eyes.

"You and I both know you have a very long tradition of death."

That's true. But he won't give in. He steps back, so that Elle's hand falls to her side.

"Not in your case. Or don't you remember knocking me out cold?"

Though Elle's lips remain fixed in her sardonic smile, the bravado leaves her pale face, like a power switch flipped off. When she speaks again, her voice is quiet -- though not so much for Gabriel's heightened sense of hearing. "I promise I won't do it again this time."

Gabriel's eyes are drawn once more to the scar above her eyebrow. His heart thuds as he works out Elle's meaning. "You're asking me to--"

"Finish what you started," she says. "Kill me. Take my power. Angela told me to find a new life. I'm choosing death."

As Gabriel stares in astonishment at Elle's offer, she shakes her long, wavy blonde hair and flashes another smile. He can't help but think how beautiful she is, how special -- though she clearly doesn't appreciate that as much as he does. And that's the most tempting quality of all...

"So what do you say, Gabriel? Will you help me do what Mother Dearest says?"

_To be continued..._

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_**A/N: It's probably not the wisest idea to start a WIP when new episodes tonight and the next couple weeks will most likely make this scenario impossible, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone till I did something with it. Hopefully the premise will be interesting enough that people will keep reading regardless. :) Knowing what you think of this story will help motivate me to update faster! Those of you kind enough to leave a little feedback will get a private visit with Gabriel, who'll be as angelic -- or not -- as you wish. ;)**_


	2. Part II

**_A/N: As I suspected, this fic no longer really fits into the season 3 timeline as of episode 3.6. Hopefully the characterizations, at least, are still in tact. Feedback welcome and much appreciated! Also, I'm trying to remain spoiler-free, so please don't mention spoilers for upcoming episodes in any comments. Thanks. :)  


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**Part II**

"I would've looked the other way, you know," Angela says as two workmen down the hall heft a door off the linoleum, their boots crunching on the shards of glass littering the floor. "If you'd killed her."

Surveying the damage to his room, replaying the fight scene in his mind, Gabriel can't believe he _didn't _kill Elle. He'd flung her hard enough that her petite body slammed against the door and ripped it off its hinges before she struck the window of the vacant room across from his and fell, unconscious, in a shower of broken glass.

"I never meant to fight. She was using her power..."

He becomes breathless thinking about the current of electricity tearing through vein and marrow, igniting a level of sensation unlike anything his body has ever before experienced, arousing the very depths of the hunger within him.

"I told her to get out," he continues, to distract himself from walking the path to temptation, "but she refused. I had to get her out. I was so afraid I'd lose control and take her power..."

"Of course you didn't mean to hurt anyone," says Angela, more briskly than comforting, as Gabriel feels the situation merits. But she's getting used to being his mother again. "Elle's survived worse. A few bumps and bruises, that's all. She was conscious when they took her to the infirmary, if you were too distraught to notice."

"I noticed," Gabriel says, and lets out his breath as he did when Elle's blue-gray eyes blinked blearily open as she lay crumpled in the corridor. He imagines she'll be a little more worse for the wear than Angela thinks; she hadn't seen Elle go through the door, as he had -- though in fairness, Angela _is_ the one who sees the future in her dreams. Somehow, Gabriel doubts she'd dreamed this.

A smile tugs at his mouth, and he looks down at his mother. "I wanted Elle's power. I wanted to kill her and take it, like I killed and took from all the rest. But I fought the urge. I didn't--"

"You should have."

Gabriel's smile falters, but he forces his lips to retain their upward curve. He can't have heard her correctly. "I should have what?"

"Killed her." Angela's tone implies an _of course_ that says Gabriel is being obtuse. "Taken her power. _Finished what you started _the day you came here."

"Those were Elle's words," Gabriel says quietly, seeking his mother's eyes for reassurance, still not quite believing what his brain is telling his enhanced ears they're hearing. "She _asked _me to kill her."

Angela's sharp, monosyllabic laugh echoes in the sterile hallway. "That should have made it easier for you."

"You know Elle," Gabriel persists, telling himself there must be some joke he's not getting. "Why would she ask me to kill her?"

"Because Elle Bishop is deeply disturbed." The words fall like the shards of glass the custodian is dumping from dustpan to waste bin. "She's weak. All her life she struggled to integrate her abilities into her life. It destroyed her sanity."

"Then we should be helping her!"

Gabriel startles at the passion in his own voice. He's spoken so before -- to Mohinder, to the unsuspecting victims he stalked...to Maya -- but the words were lies, the decoy's of a hunter tracking prey. Doubtless anyone who heard him then would believe he's sincere now, that he genuinely relates to another human being's struggle with extraordinary abilities and wants to help, as he has since been helped.

But the woman who has been his chief help is looking at him tolerantly, speaking to him as if he's a child, rather than the way a mother talks to a grown son. "What do you think we've been doing all these years, Gabriel?"

"I don't know, _Mother_. Elle said you told her to leave here. That doesn't really sound like helping someone whose father was just murdered."

A dark eyebrow arches, and Garbiel burns with shame even before Angela says, "And you think _you're _the one to help her cope with that?"

For a moment the sounds of the workers are impossibly loud as Gabriel stands, head bowed.

And then Angela continues, in a business-like tone, as if she's said nothing untoward, "If you knew the terrible things Bob did to Elle, you'd be glad you killed him."

"Maybe that's why she struggles with her abilities."

"Other people have overcome much more devastating powers than Elle's," Angela says, appraising him. "Not all of us treated her like her father did. If we weren't enough to help her pull herself together, then she--"

"Should die?"

Angela sighs. "She's a liability to this company--"

"Aren't I?" Gabriel flings back at her, the old urge to split open her head and know what she knows rising with his temper. "I could kill you -- all of you. No one could stop me. But you've let me out of that cell on Level 5, given me a chance--"

"It's not that I hate her, it's that she knows too much."

Gabriel shakes his head, unwilling to believe that his birth mother, like his adoptive mother, could think so little of his desire to just be _normal_.

"Then lock her up. But don't ask me to kill her." A heartbeat, then, "Please."

The plea hangs overhead, as though suspended in the air by the tension between them. For a long time as Angela stares at him. Gradually, the hardened mask of her face crumbles into a compassion that compels Gabriel to bend and embrace her, resting his head on her shoulder, as he has inexplicably longed to do since she told him she is his mother.

"Oh, Gabriel," she croons, fingers stroking his hair. "I'm not asking you to do that. I'm sorry, I don't mean for you to feel like I'm training you to be my attack dog." He sighs as she goes on, "If you knew who we face, you'd understand my fears..."

Angela's body tenses, her arms holding Gabriel tighter against her, their roles as comforter and comforted seemingly reversed -- but only for a second. Her demeanor softens again, and she just grazes his forehead with her lips.

"I know in your heart you're a watchmaker. Your gift is meant to enable you to put things together, not take them apart."

Closing his eyes, Gabriel holds on to her words, the very words he begged Virginia to say to him; he embraces Angela, his _real _mother, tightly, as if letting go of her will take them away, prove the moment to be the imagination of a heart left too long to hunger. It passes soon enough as it is. Gabriel's mind, always keen for knowledge, takes a step backward in the conversation, fixating on the other words that fell among Angela's maternal affirmation.

"Mom?" Lifting his head, he peers deep into Angela's troubled eyes. "Who is it? If I knew what you know, maybe I could help--"

"No," says Angela with a faint smile and a far-away look on her face. "No, dear, for now you should concentrate on putting things together. The time for the other will come before we're ready."

Though skeptical, Gabriel nods. He glances down the hall where a workman is removing the damaged hinges from the door frame of his room.

"I think I'll start in the infirmary. With Elle."

He starts for the stairwell, but turns back when Angela calls his name.

"If...you aren't able to control it, you'll have another chance. I gave you up once, Gabriel, but I'll never give up on you."

The statement contains such a bizarre mixture of support and discouragement that Gabriel isn't sure what to feel or how to react. Did Angela mean what she'd just said about him being a watchmaker, not an attack dog? Does she believe he can really change? Is she trying to manipulate him into offing Elle? Or is the voice of her fears talking, warping a mother's sense of what is best for her son?

Giving her the benefit of the doubt, Gabriel finally says, hoarsely, "Then don't give up having a little faith in me."

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Outside the hospital room where Elle was taken after the fight, Gabriel realizes he doesn't know what he's going to say to her. _I'm sorry_ might be a start, but...Sorry for what? For breaking her ribs and giving her a concussion, as the nurse on duty informed him of Elle's status? Sorry for not helping her commit suicide? Nothing sounds right.

Ridiculously, he wishes he had flowers or a balloon or a get well teddy bear or something. People always bring flowers and gifts to hospitals. Granted, the Company hospital, lying a few floors above a high-security confinement block for dangerous criminals, isn't like most hospitals, and while equipped with more than most people would dream of, lacks a florist and gift shop. Anyway, Gabriel decides, it probably only makes an awkward situation more so to give flowers to someone who's only in the hospital because _you_ put them there.

Reaching for the doorknob, he catches his reflection in the slat of glass in the door and notices he looks fresh from the fight. Although, of course, the minor injuries he sustained have healed, he wishes he'd stopped to change his rumpled shirt, comb his hair, shave...And then he chides himself for being a self-centered ass. This isn't about him; it's about Elle.

He draws a fortifying deep breath, opens the door, and strides through, still not knowing what the hell he's going to say. But before he can think about it, the sound of his own voice fills the tiny space, silent other than the beep of the machine monitoring Elle's vitals.

"You know, electrocuting me really isn't the best way to convince me you won't knock me out if I try to perform a lobotomy on you."

Momentary panic grips Gabriel at the thought of having been far too flippant with a girl who's not only been injured at his hands, but is suicidal, as well...But he relaxes when a chuckle rattles from Elle's throat.

Though the laughter quickly dissolves into a cough that doubles her over in the elevated hospital bed, it doesn't stop her from rasping, "That's because I was trying to convince you that you want my power," or from managing to look sexy to Gabriel as she says it. His eyes wander over the powder blue hospital gown tied loosely around her no doubt bandaged ribcage, slipping off one shoulder, and her disheveled blonde locks falling into her pain-brightened eyes. "Did it work?"

"No. I don't want your power." But other things of hers--He nips the lustful thought in the bud. This is _not _the time or place.

"Yeah, you do. You want everyone's powers."

"What is this?" Gabriel says lightly, even though it's true, the wanting, the _hunger_, hasn't stopped since he embarked upon this quest to reform, and now, apparently, it's combined with a different kind of hunger. "Are you trying to cultivate mind control?"

The coughing fit past, Elle sinks back against her pillows, exhausted, and gives her head a minute shake. "Just basic reverse psychology."

"I hate to break it to you," says Gabriel, stepping further into the room, stopping at the foot of the bed, "but that's not really working, either. Right now I only want to give power. If only I could teach you to access the part of the brain that controls cellular regeneration..."

Beneath her bangs, one of Elle's eyebrows quirks. "Okay, that's seriously got to be the geekiest thing a guy's ever said to me."

"Well..." Gabriel gives a lopsided grin, and, feeling self-conscious, rubs the back of his neck above his collar, his skin prickling hotly. "I am a watchmaker, after all. Typically thought of as a geeky occupation."

"I noticed the glasses on your desk. With the little magnifying lenses."

"Sexy, right?"

"Uh, no. Not the word I'd use." Abruptly, Elle's bantering mood, which, though so unexpected, had put Gabriel pleasantly at ease, vanishes. "Sit down, Sylar."

"Gabriel," he corrects her, even as he moves to lower himself into the uncomfortable chair beside the bed.

Elle rolls her eyes. "Whatever. Why are you doing this?"

"Why am I visiting you?" Gabriel asks, then says, quietly, "Or why am I not killing you?"

"Both."

"I'm visiting you because I want to help you." It sounds foolish to him even before Elle snorts. He did, after all, kill her father...

"The only way you can help me is by killing me."

"I'm not going to do that."

"Yeah. You said that already." Sighing, Elle seems very small and young, a lost little girl, against her pillows. "_Why_?"

It's a legitimate question, though one Gabriel is not at all sure how to answer. Contemplating his reply, his eye catches the cracked face of his wristwatch.

"Because I'm tired of being a broken timepiece," he says.

Elle stares at him. "I'm taking a crap load of pain medication here. Can you not be metaphorical?"

Undaunted by her cynicism, Gabriel sits forward in his chair and explains, "I became Sylar because I wanted to be someone special, someone of significance. I hungered for it. But the more I took from others and added to myself, the more I filled the hunger, the more ravenous I became, the more fragmented. Then I met my mother, my brother, and even though our relationship is far from perfect, the part of me that always wished for family like me is complete. I'm learning that my power doesn't have to have power over me, and what it really means to be significant."

He stops speaking with a feeling of elation, of being swept away by the truth and understanding that rushed from his lips like waters through an open floodgate. So much became clear as he spoke. In his solitary confinement, he'd had little to do but think, but until now hadn't realized how much he'd wanted to talk. He feels victorious at another facet of himself reclaimed; Sylar hoards knowledge, but Gabriel is keen to share. He recalls the thrill of tea with Chandra Suresh, of hours slipping by without their noticing as he told the scientist all he'd felt when reading his book on human evolution -- before the hunger consumed him.

In his enthusiasm, Gabriel sits at the edge of his chair, leaning forward, stretching out his hand toward the young woman in the hospital bed. His face is flushed.

"Don't you see, Elle? I have a chance to use my abilities to do some good in the world. I know I can never atone for all the terrible things I've done..." He falters, briefly, his mind filling in the blank: _Like kill your father_. "But Angela says something worse than any of that is coming, and now that I've got control, I can stop it."

"Oh, I get it." Elle's characteristically flippant tone has precisely the effect on Gabriel that a pin has on a balloon. "When you were the only supervillain running around, that fed your ego. Now there are a bunch of you on the loose--"

"I'm not talking about the escapees from Level 5--"

"--so you're going to be a superhero to get your ego stroked again." She lets out a short, mocking laugh, shaking her head. "You've got an ego problem, not a hunger. And let go of my hand, you freak!"

Gabriel is so astonished to feel Elle's small hand wriggle in his grasp that he can't even think about her words. _When did he take her hand?_ he wonders, releasing it. Clearly some part of him wanted the contact, because his hand feels empty now.

"Sorry," he says, looking down as he clasps his fingers together in his lap. "Guess I got a little carried away."

"So much for control, huh?"

Gabriel looks up at her, his mouth open in a sharp retort that does when he sees laughter playing on Elle's lips, a teasing expression in her eyes. His shoulders roll forward, relaxing, as he studies the pretty blonde whose observations run so much deeper than the plastic Electroshock Barbie Angela makes her out to be. He wonders who's seen this side of Elle as much as he wonders whether she might have a point about him. He quakes inwardly that she might, and, catching himself reaching for her hand again, occupies his hands with pulling a loose thread from her woven blanket.

"What makes you think this is an ego trip?" he asks.

"You throw the word _significance _around a hell of a lot."

She does have a point. _Damn_. And yet simply knowing that someone has taken an interest in puzzling him out, for good or for bad, takes the edge off the idea that his motives may be self-serving.

"Doesn't everyone want to be significant? Don't you, Elle?"

Her eyes flash, briefly, then she turns her head away, her face looking pinched and pained. Knowing nothing of Elle apart from Angela's descriptors -- _weak, unable to integrate her abilities, disturbed_ -- Gabriel regrets his question.

"I want to believe I'm doing this because there's goodness in me. My brother -- Peter -- traveled to a future where I can control my powers. That has to mean there's goodness in me. If it were ego, I'd surely fail. Wouldn't I?"

"I don't give a shit about your goodness, _Sylar_," Elle spits. "And if you're not going to kill me, you can leave."

"Elle, I--"

"_Fuck. Off._"

Gabriel stumbles off his chair and out of the room as if he's been blasted out by one of Elle's bolts of electricity. As he pulls the door shut, he catches a glimpse of Elle's profile, reddened, against the stark white of the bed linens. He thinks she might be crying, and the thought of having brought her to tears, no matter that he's not sure how, makes him ill.

One thing he _is_ sure of is that he wasn't a hero today. Maybe Elle is right about him being an egomaniac. It certainly didn't take him long to forget that this discussion was supposed to be about her. As usual, he'd made it all about him.

Which was hardly living up to his name.

_To be continued...

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_**A/N: Thanks so much to all of you who read part one and encouraged me to continue. I'd love to know what you think of this chapter, as tensions build between Gabriel and the women in his life. As incentive, reviewers will get a visit (not necessarily in the hospital, unless you like that sort of thing ;)) from the Gabriel of your choice: romantic Gabriel, who shows up with a bouquet of flowers**_; _**watchmaker Gabriel, who parts his hair on the side and woos you with geeky talk; or Sylar, who only wants you for your brain. **_


	3. Part III

_**A/N: Apologies for the delay between updates! Life's been a bit unkind in regard to fanfic time, but y'all really motivated me to write the next chapter. Thanks very much for your support of this story, even though it's obviously quite different from the way Sylar/Elle is unfolding on the show. Someday I'll write a canon-compliant version. For now, though, I hope you enjoy this chapter, and I'll do my best to get the next one up in a more timely fashion.

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**Part III**

The electrician, hired to repair the shorted-out lock on Gabriel's door -- Mervin, according to the embroidered patch on his olive green work shirt -- presses a purple bouquet into Gabriel's hand, then, red-faced, glances around the corridor to be sure no one witnessed the questionable scene.

Gabriel blinks at the flowers in disbelief. "These aren't hyacinths." He looks up at Mervin, frowning. "I asked you to get me purple hyacinths, Mervin. In fact, I _paid _you to get me purple hyacinths." With a pair of solid gold pliers. "These are carnations."

Mervin shrugs. "They're purple. Purple flowers are purple flowers, right?"

"Wrong." Gabriel speaks deliberately, in clipped syllables, struggling to control his rising temper. "Purple hyacinths are apology flowers. Purple carnations are for capriciousness."

The electrician, already reasserting his heterosexuality by tinkering with the wiring in the box outside the door, casts Gabriel a skeptical look around the door frame. "What's that?"

Gabriel sighs heavily, removes his glasses, and rubs the bridge of his nose. "Nothing." He really doesn't feel like giving a workman a vocabulary lesson. "Only florology."

The fact that Mervin lifts his eyebrows and says _ooo-kay_ in a drawn out tone lessens Gabriel's disappointment somewhat, if not his guilt that he's using Elle's father's ability in this way. There's every chance that Elle, like the electrician, will think purples flowers are purple flowers, and won't know that these represent capriciousness, or that he's applying that attribute to her.

Even if it is actually quite an apt description of Elle...

He'll give them to her anyway, Gabriel resolves, putting on his glasses again and inspecting the bouquet. It's not nearly as elegant hyacinths would have been, but people who are restricted to the confines of company headquarters can't be choosers. He thanks the electrician for running his errand for him, then heads downstairs to the infirmary, confident that the purple flowers will at least brightened Elle's drab, institutional green and off-white hospital room.

Approaching the room, however, he starts to feel less sure of himself as the plastic sheath around the flower stems grows moist in his clenched fist. With his enhanced ears he hears rather than feels the too-quick palpitations of his heart; heat prickles from his collar into his cheeks when a voice in his mind whispers that carnations are the awkward offering of a shy watchmaker's son who is far from being the cool kid at school. It occurs to Gabriel that what ought to trouble him now is what Elle will make of her father's killer bringing her flowers, but that thought is so far overshadowed as to be nonexistent by his fear of the beautiful blonde laughing at the hopes of the geek. Beauty and the geek? Does beauty ever choose the geek? Or if she does, does she stay? Not that these carnations are meant to represent any such desire in regard to Elle, who, if she has her way, definitely won't be staying.

And, apparently, that doesn't just apply to Elle's wish to depart this life. On the hospital floor, Gabriel finds the door to her hospital room open and Angela standing just inside the room overseeing the nurse helping a fully-dressed and disgruntled-looking Elle gingerly take a seat in a wheelchair.

"What's going on here?" Gabriel asks over the nurse's reassurances that Elle only has to ride in a wheelchair until she's been escorted out of the hospital ward. He grows even more self-conscious as Elle and Angela both turn and eye the purple carnations in his hand.

Particularly the latter, who arches an eyebrow. "I might ask you the same question."

Gabriel lowers his hand to his side, vainly attempting to hide the bouquet. Thankfully, before he can clear his throat or form words with his suddenly parched lips and tongue, Angela answers him.

"Elle's being discharged."

"Discharged?"

"Ironic, isn't it," says Elle, "for a girl who's pretty highly charged." She curls her fingers and sends off a rolling wave of blue sparks between them.

Tearing his eyes away from the tantalizing bolts of lightning rippling from human flesh instead of from charged cloud to charged ground, Gabriel looks in disbelief at his mother, who's rolling her eyes at Elle's joke.

"She's seriously injured!"

Angela pats his cheek with her manicured hand and says, "Don't be such a worry-wort, dear, it's only a few cracked ribs. They only kept her overnight for observation because of the concussion."

Elle's pale face and dark-rimmed eyes don't minimalize the pain of cracked ribs, but her voice holds only her usual defiance. "Your mom's not kicking me out again. I get to stay here until my ribs heal. Or until you kill me, whichever comes first."

"That's not exactly what I said," says Angela, hand falling to her side as her eyes narrow on Elle, "and I'll thank you not to repay my generosity by turning my son against me."

"I thought after Nathan you'd be used to it by now."

There's more Gabriel's being kept in the dark about than he knew, he realizes. What's happening with Nathan -- the older brother he hasn't yet met, or even heard much about, beyond the fact that he was elected to Congress, but fell short of the political heights his mother had so hoped he would reach? Does Nathan's betrayal have anything to do with Angela's recent fears? Is he a powerful nemesis?

The one thing Gabriel does know is that he's not going to get any answers from her. Not yet, anyway.

"Where will Elle be staying?" he asks. "I'd be happy to take her to her room."

This plan is, of course, fine with Elle, but Gabriel is slightly surprised when, as he brushes past the nurse to stand behind Elle's wheelchair, that Angela doesn't protest. Not that he's not used to people doing what he wants, but Angela is the first in a very long time -- since Virginia Gray -- for whom the reverse is true. She agrees to let him escort Elle upstairs, again casting a wary eye over the Gabriel's.

Maybe, he thinks, feeling nauseated, she really does hope he'll kill Elle. And who knows, depending on what she has to say about his family, maybe he will...just this once...So he can experience the rush of power -- literally -- as he generates electricity from the tips of his own fingers. Not the fingers of a watchmaker...the fingers of--

"What's with the flowers?" Elle's voice disrupts his delusions of grandeur, and Gabriel realizes with a start that they are alone. Once again, he feels much more like the awkward schoolboy with an impossible crush than a person capable of amassing every power on earth for his own.

"Oh." He thrusts the bouquet over Elle's shoulder, not meeting her eye as she cranes her neck to look up at him. "These are for you."

"What for?"

For a second, Gabriel panics that Elle knows what purple carnations represent. Then he chances a glance at her and sees that all the harshness her face took on when she was sparring with Angela has been wiped away with an innocence and disbelief and a faint glow of happiness that makes him wonder whether she's ever been given flowers before.

He moves around in front of her so she won't strain her ribs twisting in the chair. "Because you're in the hospital."

"For the moment."

"And because I'm sorry."

"For what?" She lifts an elbow, cocks her head, eyeing him up like a cat playing with a mouse before a kill.

Gabriel, for reasons unbeknownst to himself, plays along. "For putting you here. And for upsetting you yesterday."

Elle pushes herself out of the wheelchair, wincing in pain.

"You should sit--"

"I can walk." She does, straight out the door, pausing with one hand on the jamb to glance suggestively over her shoulder. "Flowers are nice, but they're not going to make it all better. You know what will."

Gabriel follows her down the silent, sterile infirmary corridor. Her stride is reduced to a hobble, she's clearly in pain; he wishes he'd insisted her using the wheelchair.

"I'm not going to do that," he says. "Yet."

"_Yet_? Finally, progress."

"I want you to tell me about my brother."

"Which one? I know lots about Peter. We spent a lot of time together when he was staying here."

Something about the way she talks about Peter, and spending time with him, makes the hairs on the back of Gabriel's warm neck stand with the mortified jealousy of a geek overhearing the cheerleader he secretly longs for talking about the jock she wants. He reaches around her, careful not to let his body brush against hers, and punches the up button.

"Nathan."

"Oh, I get it. You're not quite the mama's boy you want me to think you are. It'll make you feel better about your own doubts to know why big brother doesn't trust her."

If he didn't already know Elle's ability, Gabriel would think hers is telepathy. Her powers of perception are impressive -- though he's not about to give her leverage over him by acknowledging it.

"How do you know I'm not sizing up Nathan as a potential enemy?"

"Because he _flies_. Not much he can do with that to hurt your mother. He can't even drop a grand piano or an anvil or anything on her head, because he doesn't have super strength."

"My brother can fly?" That old longing every child has to fly seizes him. To break free of gravity, to soar through the sky, to be high above everyone else on earth, where he should be... "What a special gift."

"Yeah -- if the Wright brothers had known you could make flight in a test tube, they wouldn't have bothered with airplanes."

The elevator arrives, and as the doors glide open, Gabriel steps aside for Elle to enter first. "What do you mean?"

"The Company used to give people powers."

"What?" Gabriel squeezes onto the elevator as the doors slide shut again. "How?"

"I thought you knew how everything worked."

Elle smirks at Gabriel as she punches the button to level two, the same floor on which his room lies. It occurs to him that he doesn't know where exactly they're going, and as the elevator ascends, he asks where Elle will be staying. She informs him the room across the hall from his is the one she occupied her whole life. All her things are still there. Gabriel's stomach reacts strangely to the information -- it's like the hunger, but also not like. He can't quite pinpoint it, but he knows being in such close proximity to Elle is going to be temptation. He presses himself against the wall, placing as much distance between their bodies as he can in the confines of the elevator.

"You were telling me about the Company," he says, "and my brother's ability."

"I don't know how they give people powers," Elle tells him. "I just know that they can. They did it to Nathan."

"How do you know?"

"He found me and told me. Him and this blonde who turns things to ice."

"I can do that," Gabriel says absently, but doesn't demonstrate. "Nathan wasn't born special, but they made him special."

"Yep."

"They can make anyone special?"

"I guess. Do you know how much you say _special_? You should try expanding your vocabulary. Get one of those word-a-day-calendars or something."

Gabriel ignores her, his mind racing with possibilities. Was his ability given to him? If so, he might be saved -- the hunger might not be his nature at all. Not that he relishes the idea of being a Frankenstein's monster...

The elevator lurches to a halt, chiming as the doors open to reveal the familiar corridor of level two. Elle starts to disembark, but in a swift motion, Gabriel catches her elbow, pulls her back inside the elevator, pushes the button to close the doors again, and stands in front of them, blocking Elle's exit.

She backs away from him, warily -- a reflex, not a conscious action, as there's a gleam in her eye, too. She thinks he's going to kill her now, wants him to kill her, but nonetheless is afraid; Gabriel knows because he hears the sudden rapid staccato of her heart, the shallowness of her breathing. Her fear is beautiful and exciting, grips him at his core and makes the hunger more acute. The familiar rush of the sense of total power he has over her sweeps through him, though instead splitting her forehead with his telekinetic abilities, he'd like to touch her, to trace soft lips with the pad of his fingertip...

"If everyone's special," he interrupts his imaginations, "then no one will be special."

"Not everyone. Nathan won't be, if he can help it."

"Nathan doesn't want his power?" It's unthinkable to Gabriel that anyone would wish power away. It would be like wishing your thumbs away.

"I don't want mine, either." Elle says. "I want you to have it."

She approaches him, blue eyes sparking. Gabriel's dart down to her lips again. He swallows, averts his gaze, and sees her hands. Electricity crackles between her fingers like brilliant dew-covered spider webs, lethal to the wriggling insect Gabriel feels like pressed to the elevator wall.

"Did they give you your power?" he asks.

Elle shakes her head and grips the steel handrail that runs along the perimeter of the elevator; Gabriel jolts, brushing against her slight frame, as the metal conducts a current from Elle to him.

"Worse," she says. "They did experiments."

Gabriel listens in fascinated horror as Elle tells him of her own father leading the charge -- no pun intended -- in using her as a human lightning rod.

"I was born special, but not special _enough_. He tried to make me better, but he made me worse. And then he didn't want me. So he used me. He didn't care whether I lived or died -- that's why he sent me after you."

The lights in the elevator flicker; Gabriel wonders if the power's surging all over the building. He wants that control -- imagines himself literally holding all the power of New York City in his hands. That would make him special...He could be President, like Virginia always wanted; surely Angela, the mother of one politician, would like to see that, too.

But even as Gabriel eyes the scar on Elle's forehead, imagines opening her, braving the shockwaves of that power transferring itself into his body, he makes no move to grant the death wish. For Elle's life story might be his own. He knows what it is not to be special enough..._Just a watchmaker_...His birth mother didn't want him. She couldn't have, or she wouldn't have given him up for adoption. _Why? _So many times he's opened his mouth to ask Angela, only to clamp his lips shut again, unable to bear the likely rejection, fearing what he might do if he cannot accept what he hears.

"If you want to die," he asks, "why don't you kill yourself?"

The lights stop flickering as Elle withdraws her hand from the railing. She looks very young and small and powerless clutching her carnation bouquet, the gift of a playground suitor.

"It has to be you."

"Why?"

Elle just stares at him, her eyes pleading, her features etched with the agony that must have contorted her face as she was strapped to a table, tens of thousands of volts of electricity poured into her petite body. He thinks of how she looked when he tried to take her power, hears her tortured screams as her power, as well as his, betrayed her body.

How can she offer herself to him? Is that pain less than what she endured at the hands of her father? Can some lives be fates worse than death? Instead of murder, can killing be mercy?

_He didn't want me...I wasn't special enough_.

Suddenly Elle's inner workings become clear to him.

"Because you'd die knowing someone wants you."

The blue eyes brim, and for a second, Gabriel thinks Elle will crumple, envisions himself holding her, stroking her hair, kissing her all over until she stops hurting. But then the corners of her lips jerk upward into a smirk, and the vulnerability vanishes.

"You really do know how everything works, watch boy." Her hand hovers over the _open door_ button. "So...Have I convinced you to play Gabriel, the Angel of Death in some traditions?"

She's making fun of his erudition; despite the context, Gabriel can't help but shove his hands into his pockets and duck his head and chuckle at himself with her. "After what happened last time, you can't think I'm stupid enough to play with electricity in a metal box?"

"Good point." Elle opens the elevator doors and steps out into the corridor, Gabriel at her heels. She turns to him with her arms spread wide. "Fire at will."

"Not right now," Gabriel says, laying a hand on her shoulder and gently turning her in the direction of her room. "I need to think about this."

"Lucky for you, I'm not a limited time offer."

"Is that on the infomercial?"

"Yep. Playing twenty-four hours on the Sylar Shopping Network."

"Gabriel. And you know the only reason anyone ever buys things from those channels is because the salesgirls are cute."

Realizing what he's said, his face goes red -- though not as deeply flushed as hers does after she says, "Sex sells." She cringes. "Oh God, I'm _so_ not hitting on you--"

"Of course not," Gabriel reassures her. "It was just a joke."

A joke which, nonetheless, puts a goofy grin on Gabriel's face and makes him stand and replay over and over in his mind after Elle escapes into her room and draws the blinds. Until he's interrupted by he brusque Brooklyn accent of Mervin the electrician, at work behind him.

"Guess she didn't like the carnations, huh pal? Those cynthias--"

"_Hyacinths_."

"Whatever. Sorry I didn't get those other flowers if they would've got you laid."

"That's okay. Red roses are for passion."

"_Passion_. Heh. If you want some of them, I'll get you some for a gold wrench."

Gabriel stares at Elle's door, an idea forming as her words echo in his mind. _Sex sells_. "I'll remember that."

After all, he has a hunger to feed -- though not a hunger for Elle's power.

But first, he thinks, striding back toward the elevator, he has a few details to work out with his mother.

* * *

_**A/N: Reviewers will get a bouquet of dark pink roses from Gabriel -- which means "thank you," of course. ;)**_


	4. Part IV

_**A/N: This is the chapter that kind of inspired the whole fic. Hope y'all like it...

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**Part IV**

"Mom, I need to borrow the car."

The small but nonetheless imperious woman sitting behind the massive executive's desk blinks up at Gabriel as he strides into her office. In contradiction to his bold words, he falters at her piercing gaze; he stops short with his hand on the doorknob, bracing himself for his mother's inevitable _no_, feeling every inch the adolescent boy who would typically make such a request.

Angela, however, doesn't say _no_. She lays down her pen, sits back in her chair. Her lined features soften, and her pale lips, perpetually down-turned since Gabriel met her, curve upward in a faint, nostalgic smile that might even have a hint of wistfulness about it. Or is that wishful thinking on Gabriel's part?"

"Your brothers have said that to me, oh, hundreds of times."

"Did you tell them yes?"

"Occasionally." A pause, then, quietly, "I never thought I'd hear those words from you."

For a moment she holds Gabriel's eyes, but gradually her gaze turned inward, seeing things tucked privately away in her own far-seeing mind. Gabriel thinks he sees her check muscle twitch.

"Did your adoptive mother," she continues, stiffly, the last word half choked with...with what? Resentment? Envy? "Did she let you borrow the car?"

"We didn't have one."

Gabriel never thought much of this -- so many New Yorkers don't have cars -- but now, comparing the working class Grays who adopted him to the upper crust Petrelli family he was born into, his chest tightens with shame and indignation that he's had none of that to which his birthright entitles him. He should be asking for a great deal more than to be lent a car. He'll keep that in mind for leverage, although the prevailing thought at the moment is if Virginia Gray knew from what stock he came and, if so, whether that lay behind her obsession with his being special.

"I missed so much of your life, Gabriel," Angela says with a sigh. "Practically everything."

"You should've thought about that before you gave me up for adoption." Gabriel is aware that he's being cruel if Angela's ruefulness is sincere, but he cannot help but be wary of crocodile tears.

Nothing in her body language or tone gives her away with her reply. "I had no choice."

The one argument Gabriel can't argue with disarms him. He pushes the office door shut behind him and leans back against it. "Why couldn't you keep me?" he asks, as he's been too afraid to ask since Angela revealed her maternity. He's still afraid now, but in light of what he learned about Elle's childhood in the Company, he must know where he fits into it all.

Again Angela's lips hitch into that wan smile. "That's something I was glad I'd never have to hear you ask. Coward that I am."

She looks so sad, so _guilty_, that, crocodile tears be damned, Gabriel strides around her desk, covers her hand clutching the armrest with his.

"I don't think you're a coward. You let me off Level Five." He gives her a smile, and she squeezes his hand. "You believe in me."

"It's not courageous to believe in your own son. It's maternal instinct."

Angela pulls her hand free from his grasp and sits up at her desk with the perfect posture of a debutante, which dowdy, common Virginia Gray never could have emulated. And yet she'd always expected it of Gabriel, scolding him for slouching, hands in his pockets or fidgeting with his glasses -- which he catches himself doing now, as he obeys Angela's bidding to take a chair because he'll want to be sitting down for this.

"When you were an infant," she says, after an interminable silence during which Gabriel wonders whether the Nakamura guy's around, bending space and time, "I tried to drown you."

She says just the way she would say something as mundane and expected as, _When you were an infant, I changed your diapers_, that it takes a moment even for Gabriel's enhanced ears to take in the meaning of the words.

"You tried to..._kill me_?"

"I had a dream. I saw what you would do...what you would become."

Gabriel thinks he ought to be horrified, angered by this ultimate of betrayals, but instead feels only a detached fascination. The time for feelings will come later. For now, he needs to learn how this family unit, of which he's found himself a part, works.

"And you were afraid? So terrified you wanted to destroy me?"

"Not me. Your father."

"My father."

All Gabriel knows about his father -- his real father, not Thomas Gray, the watchmaker -- is that his name is -- _was_ -- Arthur, and that he died a little over a year ago. Around the same time as Gabriel's abilities manifested, he can't help but think, wondering if there's some correlation.

"Did he have a special ability, too?" he asks. And did Arthur fear his son would grow up to kill him for it? he doesn't ask aloud.

"He certainly did. He used it to convince me to drown you when I was giving you a bath. Which, I'm aware," she adds with a sigh, "probably sounds like a convenient excuse to absolve myself, but I swear to God, I'm telling the truth."

It does, but Gabriel's struggling too hard against the images of a head of patchy black hair lathered in baby shampoo being dunked under lukewarm bathwater on which rubber ducks and toy boats bob, bubbles rising to the surface as oxygen escapes the flailing, pudgy body when the baby's mouth opens in a cry of protest, to examine the veracity of Angela's story.

"My father was a telepath?" he asks.

"He had telepathic abilities, but his core power was empathy. Just like Peter." A pause; Angela's eyes command Gabriel's rapt attention on her face. "Just like you."

"What?" In spite of the heaviness of the moment before, Gabriel laughs at the absurdity of the idea. "_Me_, an empath? I'm the sociopath who went psycho and became a serial killer, remember?" He laughs again, but Angela's voice cuts him off.

"I told you, Gabriel, you have no idea what you're capable of. Impossible as it may sound, you _are _an empath. It was your empathy that stopped me from drowning you."

Gabriel's residual, silent laughter dies. "Do you mean my abilities manifested when I was a baby?"

"To a degree, temporarily. Fight or flight."

Gabriel nods. "Survival instinct. What did I do?"

"We don't know exactly. As far as we can understand, one minute I was holding you under the water, determined that I must kill you, and the next I was fully aware of what I was doing and pulling you out of the water. If my precious baby hadn't been in danger, the look on Arthur's face would have been priceless. He'd never lost control of a mind before."

Though feeling a little ill at his mother being able to recall her child's near-death experience -- at the hands of his father, no less -- and see a shred of anything amusing, Gabriel asks, "Are you sure it was me? Maybe your precognitive--"

"My ability is limited to the future, not the present. It was _you_, Gabriel, and your father knew it."

Leaning one elbow on the armrest of his chair, Gabriel rakes unsteady fingers through his comb-backed hair and lets out his breath. This is so much to process. Part of him thinks he should be hurt, angry but he still doesn't feel anything beyond the desire to know the rest of the story. Even though every word of it might be a lie.

"Did my father make any other attempts on my life?"

"No. Frightened as he was of what I'd seen, that little episode piqued his curiosity." She adds, bitterly, "He never could resist a show of power."

Gabriel hangs his head under the weight of accusation contained in her words, whether intended by her or merely the condemnation of his own active conscience.

"You were a threat," Angela goes on, "but you also had the potential to be very useful to the Company. So Arthur decided we'd put you up for adoption, thinking that growing up among ordinary people would dull your taste for power." She shakes her head. "It never occurred to him the future I dreamed was one in which you were raised by others."

"Nature versus nurture?"

Angela smiles a little. Gabriel thinks, _hopes_, the expression is one of maternal pride, until she says, bluntly, "You're a classic case," which stings worse than Elle's jolts of electricity. "If only you'd been raised at home, with your brothers and parents who knew what kind of a child they were dealing with, your ability would have manifested very differently. Instead, you were so starved for the protection and guidance you needed that you developed this hunger you describe."

In the pause, she looks at Gabriel with sad eyes; for a moment, he thinks she's going to apologize for giving him up, for not standing up to her husband for the good of her otherwise poor, damned child. But no such words break the silence, so Gabriel is left to realize that the sorrow on Angela's face is not the unconditional love of a mother, but _pity_ -- the pity of the kind of woman who let Bob Bishop experiment on his daughter...who allowed her own child to be genetically altered to be special enough...who doesn't think any of her children are capable of amounting to anything when left to their own devices...

"Was I born with my abilities, _Mother_?"

Gabriel narrows his scrutinizing watchmaker's gaze on Angela and notes her face pale a shade even though her voice never wavers from its edge of authority.

"Excuse me?"

"I know about Nathan." He stands for the advantage of physical size, moving swiftly around the desk to stand behind Angela's chair. "Peter and I have the same ability. Was he the control in your little experiment while I was the variable?"

Leaning over the chair, his arms on either side of Angela's rigid frame, he covers Angela's hands clutching the armrests with his own. He hears her pulse keep its steady tempo as she answers, truthfully:

"Yes." A heartbeat of silence, then, "But at least you were still alive."

"Would death have been a worse fate than becoming a monster?"

"Yes, if there was hope for your redemption. Which I believed there was. I still believe it."

"Do you?"

Gabriel spins the swivel chair so that Angela is peering up into his face as he bends intimidatingly down over her. Only Angela doesn't appear at all intimidated, which only makes his temper flare.

"Do you really care if I'm redeemed, or is this just another Company experiment?"

Angela's palm connects with his cheek so solidly that the crack of flesh against flesh echoes in the office.

"Get a grip on yourself," she hisses. "Or do you want a repeat performance of what happened to Virginia Gray?"

Duly chastened, Gabriel releases the chair and falls back from her, ashamed all over again about what happened that day in the shabby Queens apartment as much as for the step backward he took just now. He stammers an apology; he wants to reach out for Angela, to lay a gentle watchmaker's hand on her shoulder to reassure her that he won't hurt her, but, sure his is an unwelcome touch now, he shoves his hands into his pockets and stares at the floor.

Angela sighs heavily, her chair creaking as she leans back in it. "I know it's distressing for you to hear these things. But it's time you heard them."

Gabriel nods, but still cannot look at his mother.

"Your father," she says, haltingly, evidently unsure of herself for the first time in the course of the discussion. She clears her throat. "Your father is a very difficult man to kill."

Gabriel's head snaps up. "You mean...?"

He can't go on as he's dizzied to the point of speechlessness by the shocking realizations coming to him all at once. Arthur Petreilli is not dead...Angela tried to kill him -- why? Maybe in some deep part of her, she did it to avenge her little lost child?...But in spite of her best efforts, or perhaps because of them, Arthur is the phantasm who's haunted her these last days.

"I can't deny I need you now, Gabriel."

There's a plaintive note in her voice, a vulnerability. Again Gabriel wonders if this isn't just a bid for sympathy. And he would know, he's made enough of them himself. Maybe his acting ability and powers of manipulation are abilities he inherited from his mother.

No, not _him_ -- Sylar. He's not that person, that _monster,_ anymore. He's Gabriel. An _angel_. Gabriel trusts. Gabriel empathizes. Gabriel sees before him a woman who couldn't have put on such a convincing show of fear if she were in Oscar contention. Angela's no angel, but she's no monster, either. By all accounts, however, his father _is_. And if Gabriel somehow helped Angela break free of Arthur's devices before, then he'll do what he can to help her again.

"I guess one way or another," he says, "I'll be playing the Angel of Death."

Angela looks at him for a long time, expressionless. Then she opens a drawer of her desk and takes out a set of keys. "Now about borrowing the car..."

* * *

The keys to Angela's Rolls-Royce jangle as Gabriel fingers them in his pocket as he stands outside Elle's room. Angela gave him money, too -- a Company credit card. On the one hand, he's glad not to have to use Bob Bishop's ability to pawn gold for cash, especially not cash to be spent on Elle; on the other hand, he doesn't like being in the pay of the Company. Since his talk with Anglea, he's felt little better than an assassin. What will she want form him when the job is done? Will she want him at all, or will she be through with him, and toss him out like she tossed out Elle?

Which is why it's so important that he make this connection with Elle -- despite the fact that she has a use for him, too, after which, if he carries it out, there will be no after.

But he won't be her personal Dr. Kevorkian. Gabriel's always believed there's nothing broken that can't be fixed. Why else would he have labored for seven years over a temperamental antique European timepiece? People aren't as complex as watches; he's pulled enough of both apart to know.

Letting the car keys fall noisily to the bottom of his pocket, Gabriel withdraws his hand. He adjusts his glasses on the bridge of his nose, wondering for a moment when he catches his reflection in Elle's shaded window if he ought to wear them or not; he thinks they soften him, but Elle did call him a Geek. Leaving them on, he runs his hand over his slicked-back hair -- his compromise between Sylar and Gabriel, but does it make his hairline look receding? _Is _it receding? God, he's too young for that...Holding his breath, he brings down his hand, rapping his knuckles on the door.

After a breathless moment, the blinds twitch apart enough for him to see Elle's fingers holding them open and one blue eye peeking out at him. He lifts his hand in a wave, then Elle disappears from the window only to reappear a second later in the open doorway, wearing yoga pants, a camisole with one of those built-in and totally ineffective bras, and a hopeful smile.

"Have you made up your mind?"

Gabriel grasps the doorframe and leans against it, his body brushing close to Elle's. He hears her swallow hard as she takes a step backward from him -- an action which rattles his confidence. He presses on anyway.

"I've decided you don't really want me to kill you."

Elle scowls and grabs the doorknob. "Then you're not as bright as I thought."

She starts to shut the door in his face, but Gabriel catches it. She takes another step back from him.

"Why are you avoiding me?" he asks. "Are you afraid?"

Elle plants her hands on her hips in a defiant, unmovable stance, though Gabriel doubts when she juts her chin that she means for him to think what an adorable little spitfire she is, or wonder what flavor her shining lip gloss is.

"I'm not afraid of you. Or of dying."

"You smiled when you opened the door. No one smiles at death unless they know their sins are forgiven."

At this, Elle's hardened face shifts. She blinks, her shoulders sag, as if deflated, as she releases a long breath through her nostrils. Clearly she's thought no further than the immediacy of departing this life, not considered the implications of eternity.

Unsurprisingly, Elle makes another show of confidence. "I don't believe in hell. Or if there is one, it can't be worse than my life."

Gabriel hears his own words to Angela, and hers ringing back to him in his reply. Something within him aches, though not with the hunger he's grown accustomed to. He aches _for _Elle.

"But what if your life could be better?" The door falls shut behind Gabriel as he slips further into Elle's room. "What if you could die, but keep on living?"

Elle quirks an eyebrow. "Is this Petrelli crazy talk?"

"Do you know the Metaphysical poets? Donne, Herbert, Marvell?"

"Sorry, bookworm, but Company tutors are a little deficient in the poetry department."

This doesn't dampen Gabriel's enthusiasm. "The Metaphysical poets used death as a metaphor for sex."

The instant the words leave his mouth, he flushes as shocks of Elle's laughter crackle out.

"I don't really do metaphors, but did you just ask to fuck me to death?"

Wincing at her crassness, Gabriel stammers, "No, that's not what I--"

"Not that it wouldn't be a nicer way to go than having my head split open. Probably better for you in the long run, too, unless I lose control and electrocute you at climax..." Her brow furrows. "I don't _think _that would happen. I've never--"

She bites her lip, and before Gabriel can battle through his own mortification and work out whether she means what he thinks she means, she smiles, with a coy tilt of her head, her eyes cutting flirtatiously up through her bangs at him.

"I can't take you up on your offer unless you take me out on a date first. I'm not that kind of girl."

"No, of course not." Gabriel glances down at his feet and shoves his hands into his pockets, finding comfort and stability in the cool metal of the car keys. "That's actually what I was trying to say -- I'd like to take you out."

He hears Elle's heart speed up in excitement, but looks up to meet sad eyes. "You think a date will make my life better after everything I've been through?"

"No."

Taking a chance, Gabriel withdraws his hand from his pocket and brushes the backs of his knuckles across her cheek. She doesn't flinch away. "But I thought it might show you that someone does want you. And maybe one date will lead to another, and..."

"You know, you're kinda cute," Elle says, shakily -- Gabriel thinks, touched. But of course before he can puzzle out the clues of her voice, her pulse, beating wildly now in tempo with his own, her bravado returns. "For a geek."

In the past, Gabriel would have been humiliated by the remark, but something about the way Elle says it is endearing, even affectionate. He laughs quietly, his wide grin producing a pleasant ache in his cheeks.

"So I'll pick you up tomorrow night at seven?"

Elle pulls a pout that makes Gabriel want to run his thumb along that full lower lip. "Not tonight?"

"I have to plan it first."

On impulse, he leans in and pecks Elle's cheek, then, before either of them can react, he turns and lets himself out of her room. For the rest of the night, all he can think about is the softness of her skin against his lips and the hope that tomorrow night will bring the chance to do it again -- and more.

_To be continued...

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_**A/N: Those kind enough to review get to go on their dream date with Gabriel...**_


	5. Part V

**_A/N: Apologies for the wait between chapters. I'd hoped to get writing time over Thanksgiving, but alas got too swept up in the holidays. Luckily (?) I caught a cold and had time to update this week. Of course, that could be directly responsible for the cheesy rhyming jokes and __Wicked references, so maybe that's not a good thing. ;) I hope you enjoy! There will be at least one more chapter (for the smut!) and maybe more; I'm debating how far to carry this story.

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**Part V**

Elle's blue eyes go perfectly round as she opens her door to find her nose buried in a bouquet of red roses. For passion, of course, but Gabriel thinks his romantic designs are undermined by Elle shuffling backward from the him and his offering and bumping against the edge of the door. He backs away, too, lowering the bouquet and silently berating himself for being too eager. If he doesn't watch himself, he'll scare the poor girl away before he even has a chance to show her there might be more for her -- more for them both -- than death.

As if standing too close to her door is the creepiest behavior Elle should worry about from him.

Ignoring the nasty thought, he speaks deliberately to keep the nerves out of his voice. "Hello, Elle."

He doesn't completely succeed at eliminating shakiness, but Elle gives him a wobbly smile and says, "Hi," in an equally tremulous voice. Gabriel doesn't need enhanced hearing to detect her nervousness, but his ears pick up her accelerated pulse and the rush of blood in her ears. Or is that his own? Not the most important question at the moment; _his _uncertainty is indisputable. Why is Elle nervous? Because it's a date? Or because it's a date with _him_?

For Gabriel's part, any shred of confidence he might have had about pulling off a successful date without the guiding force of an ulterior motive dissolves in the face of Elle in a midnight blue dress that hugs her breasts and hips and shows off the slender length of her legs. She's wearing black stockings, and he can't help but wonder if they're the kind with a seam up the back and held up by a sexy little garter belt -- and, more importantly, whether he'll get to find out. Probably not. Even if he did spend half the day shopping for the perfect dark gray suit and green-striped shirt and tie, not wanting to appear a "Company man" in the clothes his mother picked out for him for his missions with Bennet, this blonde bombshell is so far out of his league. His glasses start to slide down the bridge of his sweaty nose; he plucks them off.

"These are for you." He thrusts out the roses, almost getting Elle in the face again.

Their fingers brush as Elle accepts the bouquet, and she jerks her hand back quickly, as though receiving a shock. "You brought a vase this time."

"Oh. Yeah." Over her shoulder, Gabriel glimpses yesterday's floral offering on the bedside table. Two bouquets in two days. Over-eager, much? Even if one is only a bunch of purple carnations. "I noticed when I was here yesterday you put those in a plastic cup."

"I don't have a vase," she says, then quickly amends. "Didn't."

"Well..." Putting on his glasses again, Gabriel unfastens the button of his jacket and reaches into the inner pocket. "Now you have two."

As he procures a slender violet glass vase, a smile blooms on Elle's face. It's the expression he'd have expected the flowers to produce rather than the vessel, but he'll take what he can get.

Elle turns, and her four-inch patent heels click across the tiled floor of her room as she goes to transfer her carnations into the new vase. Gabriel sucks in his breath at the sight of the low-cut back of her dress, exposing her back almost to her waist, and the tantalizing dip between her shoulder blades along which he wants to run his tongue; her stockings do, indeed, have back seams.

"If I'd known you were a vase girl," he says, stepping just inside the room and leaning against the door frame, "I wouldn't have bothered with flowers."

Elle's grin becomes sheepish, her nose scrunching adorably. "No, I love them. You know you're the first person who's given me flowers?"

"Really? Not even your dad?" The words burst from his mouth without permission from his brain, and Gabriel cringes.

Elle arranges the roses on her dresser beside a framed photo of Bob Bishop in fishing gear with a huge catch -- the picture that formerly stood on his expansive oak desk. It's strange that Elle doesn't have a picture of the two of them together.

"A dozen red roses," Elle's voice breaks into Gabriel's thoughts, and he smiles to see her slight fingers with French-manicured nails tracing the curling edge of a barely opened bud. "Wow -- did someone forget to tell me it's Valentine's Day?"

She gives her wavy blonde hair a shake as she looks over her shoulder, peeking at Gabriel from beneath side-swept bangs with a gleam in her eyes and a curve of her shiny lips that makes his stomach feel as if its acquired his brothers' gift of flight. It's the kind of look he always dreamed of getting from a girl like Elle, but never believed he actually would. _Kind of cute for a geek_ she told him yesterday. But it doesn't instill Gabriel with confidence that his tentative courtship will actually bring the pay-off he so desires, because his response to her flirtation is crucial, and he just doesn't have one. Well -- he does, but it's not flirtatious, and in fact is quite serious and potentially embarrassing. Sylar would have a smooth line to lay on her -- though of course, Sylar would also be far more interested in looking into Elle's brain for what produces that electrical current all through that hot, petite body than in looking up her skirt to see what's keeping her stockings up. The hunger -- the one he's trying so hard not to feed, stirs. So, he blurts:

"This is actually my first date." His face is flame-hot, but he forges ahead. "I wanted to do this properly."

His heart thuds, once, and he catches his breath awaiting Elle's reply. He hates how he feels now -- like he did in school, the misfit kid with dorky hair, high-water pants, a watchmaker for a father, and a shabby Queens apartment where no one wanted to come hang out because his mom was always trying to force-feed everyone tuna fish sandwiches and those damn snow globes everywhere were kind of creepy. He's afraid to meet Elle's eyes, because he's sure she's looking at him the same way Jessica Bianchi, his pretty Biology lab partner, looked at him when he asked her to the senior prom and she told him to fuck off.

But Elle doesn't tell him to fuck off. Instead, she says, "Huh," in a tone of interest that makes Gabriel look up to see that she's gazing at him with her head tilted to one side as if she's seeing him in a new light. "This is my first date, too."

Gabriel blinks, more amazed by this than by the earlier revelation that he's the first man to give her flowers. Now he holds his tongue, unwilling to make another verbal misstep at this crucial juncture, no matter how much he hungers to know how such a thing as possible as a dateless Elle.

Plucking a shimmering silver shrug and matching clutch off the foot of her bed, Elle crosses the small room to Gabriel, the vulnerability of her confession replaced by the seductive expression he's accustomed to.

"I thought what the hell? So you're a serial killer. Might as well go out with you, since I asked you to kill me anyway and I've always wanted to go on a date before I die."

She dangles her shrug in front of him on her hooked index finger, the eyebrow not covered by her bangs lifted in a challenge. Gabriel stands motionless, unsure whether he wants to pin her to the wall and tear open her head or pin her to the bed and tear off her dress, or if Elle _really _wants him to do the former...or the latter, for that matter, or if she's just pushing his buttons. But he thinks back to three days ago, when she first asked him to kill her and she teased him with lightning bolts from her fingertips. There's no tantalizing show of power now to whet his appetite. That has to mean something.

Swallowing, he takes the shrug from her, and she turns to allow him to slide the garment over her shoulders. Fighting disappointment at covering up her back, he wonders how such a small, flimsy piece of fabric can possibly keep her warm, and imagines himself draping his suit coat, much too large for her, around her tiny frame, or tucking her into the crook of his arm. He hopes, selfishly, that their destination will be well air-conditioned.

"The only dying you'll be doing at my hands, Miss Elle," he says, chancing brushing his fingers through her long, soft hair to free it from the neckline of her shrug, "will be of the Metaphysical variety."

He thinks Elle might have shivered at his touch, but can't be sure because she turns to face him with a smirk.

"Awfully cocky for a geek, aren't you?"

Gabriel chuckles. He's getting used to Elle mockery, and rather than making him uncomfortable, she's making him less self-conscious, less ashamed to be Gabriel.

"In case you were in any doubt, I looked up a poem for you."

"Oh really? A dozen red roses and a date with a guy who reads poetry."

"Memorizes, actually."

"I think you're a keeper."

Gabriel blushes, and Elle's laugh tickles his ears.

"Well?" she says impatiently -- eagerly, even. "Let's hear it!"

"Later." As foreplay. He lay awake far too late last night planning it. "If we don't get going now, we'll be late."

"For what?"

Grinning at Elle's curiosity, Gabriel gestures for her to exit the room ahead of him. As she passes, he leans close to whisper, "It's a surprise."

Elle stops in the hall and looks at him uncertainly. "Am I dressed okay for this mystery date?"

Looking Elle unabashedly up and down, his gaze lingering for a moment on her cleavage as he wonders what kind of bra the low-backed dress permits her to wear, or if she's wearing one at all, there's no question now that what Gabriel feels has nothing to do with Elle's power -- beyond her inborn feminine power. His struggle to control himself, however, is no less than his struggle against the hunger. It might even be more difficult, as he's never fed this particular appetite.

He swallows, hard. Then clears his throat. "You're perfect."

The door clicks shut behind him, and one step closes the gap between him and Elle. On impulse, he slides his hands over the satiny fabric clinging to Elle's narrow waist. Touching her arouses a boldness in him which, frighteningly, isn't at all unlike the exhilarating rush of power he felt when he killed Brian Davis and took that first ability for himself. It's almost enough to put him off this, to call off the whole date with the young woman whose father he killed, who was, herself, almost another victim. But Elle doesn't move, in fact looks up at Gabriel breathlessly, waiting for him to continue. So he packs away every thought but her into the compartment at the back of his mind that belongs to Sylar, and proceeds with his flirtation.

"I'm tempted to cancel our dinner reservation, because you look good enough to eat."

Dipping his head, he nips gently at Elle's neck, wrapping his arms securely around her as his breath raises goose bumps on her fair skin and makes her squirm against him. Her hands come to rest on his chest, an innocent and simple touch, but nonetheless one that arouses a simultaneous desire to dominate and protect this gorgeous female. He presses his lips to her neck, and feels the vibration of her vocal chords.

"So that's how you do it."

"Do what?"

Lifting his head, Gabriel meets Elle's straight face, but her middle quivers against his hips. "Take people's powers. You eat their brains."

Rolling his eyes, Gabriel heaves an exaggerated sigh and releases her. "What do you people think I am?" He removes his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. "Some kind of zombie?"

"Pretty much," says Elle, giggling.

"Well, I'm not," he snaps, half-annoyed, half-amused.

They walk down the quiet, institutional hall to the elevator that will carry them to the street level Primatech Paper Company entrance, where Angela's Rolls Royce is parked.

As they wait for the elevator, Elle asks, "What are you, then?"

Gabriel offers Elle his hand -- which she takes. Lacing their fingers together, he lifts their twined hands to his mouth, pressing soft kisses to her knuckles.

"I'm a geeky watchmaker who's somehow gotten lucky enough to score the hottest date in New York."

He means it, and Elle looks deeply pleased to hear it, if her slightly dopey smile is anything to go by.

Although she might also be thinking that was the dopiest line ever laid on her.

But as they board the elevator and the sliding doors close on the floor where their living quarters lie, Elle squeezes his hand and says, "Only in New York?"

* * *

"Popular...Popular," Elle sings softly as she peruses a stained and sticky menu. She doesn't seem to be aware she's singing, and Gabriel watches her from across the table, a smile on his lips as she keeps going, a little off-key, and substituting hums for most of the lyrics. He could sing the entire libretto back to her, verbatim, thanks to the ability he got from that little red-haired waitress in Texas, but of course wouldn't show Elle up like that -- not on the first date, anyway.

"Catchy song, isn't it?" he says.

"Huh? Oh!" Elle ducks her head sheepishly, bangs falling over her eyes, lower lip catching between her teeth. "Sorry, I didn't mean to burst into song."

"We did just see a musical."

Gabriel nudges her foot with his under the table and discovers she's slipped off her shoes. He wondered, on their brisk two-block walk from the theater to the diner -- hand-in-hand, as they'd remained since leaving Company headquarters, whether her four-inch heels were giving her trouble. He slides his foot along hers, grinning at how little it is compared to his.

"You have a really pretty voice," he tells her.

"Really?"

"I have a good ear for that kind of thing."

"You're musical?"

She sounds so thrilled at the prospect that Gabriel hates to disappoint her. He wonders if he _could be _musical, using his enhanced memory. "Enhanced hearing."

"Oh."

There's a moment of silence, during which Gabriel wishes he hadn't mentioned his stolen powers, though Elle, looking reflective and wearing a little pleased smile, doesn't seem to be thinking about that.

"Good thing I sing well, since I think I'm gonna be singing _Popular _for the rest of my life. I'll have coffee and peach pie a la mode," she tells the gum-chewing waitress who just walked up to their booth.

Pleased in a totally juvenile way at his date's choice of desert, Gabriel orders, "Peach pie, not la mode."

The waitress give him a dull look. "No ice cream?"

"Yes."

She scribbles a note on her pad. "Coffee?"

"Yes, please."

As the waitress shuffles to the counter, Gabriel asks Elle, with a slight feeling of trepidation, "Apart from having the songs stuck in your head--"

"Just the one."

"--did you enjoy the show?"

It seemed like such a good idea, taking Elle to a popular Broadway musical -- and, thanks to his family connections, he was able to score prime box seats from which he'd been able to keep an eye on Elle (wearing his suit coat, because it had been freezing in the hall) as well as the actors on stage. She wore a huge grin the whole time and laughed and applauded with enthusiasm, but now she's confessed to having a song stuck in her head, he can't help but fear she found _Wicked _cheesy and annoying.

"Loved it!" The grin from the musical returns and banishes Gabriel's sudden-onset insecurity. "I've never been to a musical before, and it was so much fun. I've always loved _The Wizard of Oz. _Did you like it?"

"No, the flying monkeys always freaked me out when I was a kid."

Elle sniggers. "I mean _Wicked_."

Now it's Gabriel's turn to hunch sheepishly in his seat. "Right. I did like it, a lot. I'd like to see it again."

"Peach pie a la mode?" The tray-wielding waitress glances back and forth between them as if she has no memory of who ordered what.

"He's the one who made the clever little not la mode comment, remember?" says Elle, giving the waitress a withering glance.

The waitress reminds Gabriel vaguely of a cow as she stands chewing her gum. "So he had the peach pie without ice cream?"

"That's right, Sherlock," Elle says. When the waitress is gone, having sloshed half their coffee on the table, Elle takes a bite of her ice cream-drowned pie and says, "I wouldn't have pegged you as a peach pie kind of guy." She scrunches her face. "I rhymed again?"

Gabriel chuckles. "You did. Peach pie's my vice. Well -- one of them."

Now _he _winces. Inexperienced as he is at the art of courtship, he's fairly certain continually reminding your date that in the very recent past you were a serial killer isn't the best idea, even if she has asked to be your next victim.

Elle's lips close around another bite of pie, and she slides her fork slowly, sensuously from between her teeth. "And apparently musicals, too."

Gabriel sighs in relief that she took his comment as a joke. Briefly, he wonders whether it's good to be relieved that your date, is able to joke about your serial killer past. Either she's crazy, or he didn't make enough of an impression on her about this death wish of hers.

"I don't know about _all _musicals," he says, "but _Wicked_ definitely made an impression. I really related to it."

"Me, too."

"Which would be why you've latched onto _Popular_?"

"Right." Elle snorts into her coffee cup. "The only people I've ever been popular with are the freaks from Level Five."

The comment itself is enough to catch Gabriel off-guard, but the sadness lurking in her eyes really gets him. He recalls Elle's comment about Company tutors, which he'd scarcely given a second thought yesterday.

"Your father..." He hesitates, knowing it must be touchy for him to criticize a man he killed. "You were kept completely sheltered from the world outside the Company, weren't you, Elle?"

Picking at her pie with her fork, Elle's gaze drifts out the window to Broadway, lit up like a Christmas tree. "I hardly set foot outside the building till I became an agent. I never had a boyfriend...I never even had a _friend_."

"The outside world doesn't guarantee popularity," says Gabriel. "But you have me now."

Laughing, Elle takes a bite of her pie. "So your offer to sleep with me was a friendly gesture?"

"Friends and lovers," Gabriel says, relieved she didn't point out that he, too, is a freak from Level Five.

"Something else to do before I die. You know you haven't touched your pie." Her fork clatters to her plate as she covers her face with her hands. "Oh my God! I keep doing it!"

"Should I burst out in song so you won't be alone with the rhyming?"

"Would you?"

"The song stuck in my head isn't nearly as chipper as _Popular_."

"Which one?"

"_No One Mourns the Wicked_."

Elle lowers her hands from her face. "If that's true, it's lucky you can't die."

"We all have our bucket of water."

"That didn't work, remember? So you have nothing to worry about. Unless you take my power. Then a bucket of water could make you could short-out."

Gabriel picks up his fork and tucks into his pie, thinking there's nothing like filling your belly with comfort food when you're pouring out your heart. It's not warm anymore, but he still shuts his eyes in bliss as the gooey peach feeling overwhelms his taste buds with a sense of normalcy and enjoying simple human pleasures he hasn't experienced since his abilities manifested and brought that insatiable hunger.

"In the unlikely event of my death," he says, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin from the holder on the table, "I think I'd rather people mourn than celebrate."

Across the table, Elle goes rigid, crossing her arms over her chest. "Oh. Is that what this is all about? With me? Having someone to mourn you?"

Gabriel's mouth hangs open, not so much at Elle's accusation but because, for someone who insists she's only out with him to check "date" off her Things to Do Before She Dies list, she's awfully defensive about the prospect of being used. It gives Gabriel the confidence to get up and slide into her side of the booth.

"No, Elle, of course not." He lays his hands on her arm, gently pulling them un-crossed, and holds her hand in his lap. "I really like you."

Apparently it's the right thing to say, because immediately Elle becomes flirtatious. "What do you like about me?"

"You're smart, and funny...and you're a good singer." They laugh quietly, Elle beaming, and Gabriel continues, allowing his voice to drop to a teasing pitch, "You have a really cool ability..."

Elle opens her mouth and glares at him in mock protest, until he reaches up with his free hand to brush her bangs off of her forehead, leaning in to kiss her temple as he does.

"And because you're so beautiful."

He trails his fingers down over her high cheekbone, then across the delicate line of her jaw line and chin, and up again to settle lightly on her full lower lip. He hears Elle's heart quicken. She parts her lips slightly, just kissing his fingertips. Gabriel doesn't see sparks, but feels electricity ripple through his fingers into his hand and up his arm, the hairs standing up beneath his shirtsleeve. Holding his breath, he leans in to touch his lips to hers...

...but before they meet in a kiss, Elle pulls back from him, her eyes narrowed, blue and crackling with her power.

"And because I'm broken, and you want to fix me, _watchmaker_?"

The way she spits the word makes him think of his mother -- no, not his mother, _Virginia_ -- and how watchmaker was never special enough for her. He can't tell whether Elle really means to demean him, or if she's just trying to get a rise out of him. After staring at her for a long time, unable to arrive at a conclusion, he releases her hand and turns away from her with a sigh.

His unfinished peach pie is across the table. He starts to move it with his mind, but after one tremor of the chipped plate on the table, he stops, the image of Brian Davis with his bashed-in head and exposed brain, his blood staining the floor of Gray & Sons and painting the walls of Gabriel's apartment with the words _forgive me_ and _I have sinned_, leaping to the front of his mind, unbidden.

"I used to fix things," he says. "Then I started taking them apart."

"Because it made you special."

Gabriel nods. "Lately I've been thinking...is being special worth the price of being unwanted?" He looks at Elle. "Of being un-mourned?"

"Your mother wants you," she replies, an edge creeping into her voice, which Gabriel at first takes to be bitterness, but on further analysis, ascertains to be envy.

"My mother wants me the way your father wanted you."

Ell winces, as if stricken, but her eyes soften on Gabriel. Understanding, empathy, passes between them. It's an electrifying connection.

"What does she want you to do?"

"Kill my father."

"Your...Arthur's already dead!"

"Apparently a bucket of water doesn't work on him, either."

Elle considers this. "Are you going to do it?"

"I don't know."

Without the assistance of his telekinesis, he moves his coffee and pie across the table, eating and drinking as he relates yesterday's discussion with Angela to Elle. He holds nothing back, shares everything with her, from the attempted drowning to Angela's theories of what his upbringing meant to the manifestation of his abilities.

"But what if she's lying?" he concludes with a weary sigh, eyeing his plate, empty of every last crumb of crust and blob of filling. When the waitress comes by to add fresh, hot coffee to their mugs, he considers ordering another slice of pie, but decides against it.

"Wouldn't be the first time."

"Even if she's not lying...Even if my father is evil and deserves to die...Who am I to mete out that justice? Don't _I_ deserve death, too?"

Knowing it could mean the end of all his hopes with Elle, he meets her gaze, faces her, against whom he's sinned so grievously, as jury, judge, and executioner.

Surprisingly, her answer is a quiet, "Maybe. Maybe I do, too. I've killed people, too, Gabriel..."

_Gabriel_. He sits up, everything in him, previously so weighed down with guilt, lightening at Elle's first use of his name in a way that's not mocking.

"...and I don't even feel guilty about killing," she continues. "Maybe that makes me a worse person than you. But maybe it doesn't. Maybe neither of us deserves to be punished for what we've done, because it wasn't us, it was _them_."

"_Are people born wicked?_" he quotes. "_Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?_"

"Yeah. Something like that."

Much as Gabriel craves absolution, something holds him back from embracing the appealing idea Elle dangles before him. His eyes narrow on her.

"Why are you saying all this? Are you trying to convince me it's okay to kill you?"

"No, I--"

He grabs her roughly by the shoulders, pushing her against the wall on the side of the booth, the window sill digging into her back, and shakes her.

"Do you have any idea how much I want to do it? Your ability teases me, Elle, like a peach pie baking in the oven. All I have to do is open you up and take it. You can't even imagine how much I want you..."

Up till now he's been staring at her forehead, and the thin white scar he gave her before, which he could rip open again. But at her sharply indrawn breath, his gaze drops, and he sees her wide eyes. He can't read if she's afraid or simply surprised that he seems finally about to fulfill her request. The hesitation is just enough to bring himself under control, to remember Angela's words.

"That's not my true ability," he says, shakily, not relaxing his grip on Elle's shoulders, though his fingers around her arms feel more like he's clinging to her for support than holding her still so he can exact his work on her. "I'm capable of so much more than that..._savagery_. And I think that if I can fix you, I might have a chance at fixing _me_."

If Elle was afraid, there's no sign of it now. "Because you know me you can chance for the better?"

He's not sure if Elle means it -- she might be mocking him again. But he doesn't care, because he has hope now, faith in himself that wasn't there before.

"Maybe even for good."

His hands slide up from Elle's shoulders, fingers stroking the so-soft skin of her neck. He leans closer to her, the diner booth creaking and wobbling as he shifts his weight on the bench, so he can cup her face in his hands. Once again he brushes his thumb across her lips, wanting to kiss her, afraid to do so because she might pull away.

She doesn't.

In fact, it's Elle who closes the gap between them, pressing her lips against his.

It's nothing like Gabriel expects for a first kiss, nothing like he imagined kissing her had he had the chance to initiate; Elle kisses him hard, bruisingly, biting his lower lip and plunging her tongue into his mouth...igniting the tiniest bursts of electricity to give him a literal taste of her power. Not that he minds her passion, or has any difficulty responding with equal fervor -- though of course, sans electricity. He makes up for that by raking the fingers of one hand through her hair, sweeping the other down the bare curve of her back, slipping his fingers beneath the opening of her dress, coaxing sighs and low moans from her by pulling her practically into his lap...

A thump on the table jars his mouth from Elle's. Thinking he's rammed her legs against the underside of the table, he starts to apologize, when a brusque woman's voice that doesn't belong to Elle says.

"Here's your check."

He glances over his shoulder to see, through smudged and askew glasses, the waitress leaning against the table where she slammed down the little black folder containing their bill.

"Thank you," he says sheepishly, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet.

The waitress huffs away before he can get out his money, but flings back over her shoulder. "Get a room."

"Sorry," Gabriel apologizes, straightening his glasses, then fumbling through his wallet for a few bills to pay their tab. He's still too hazy from the kiss to comprehend the numbers on the cash or compare them with the total indicated on the check. "I should have brought you someplace classier."

"We did classy for dinner. And we couldn't make out in a classy place, could we?"

Elle takes Gabriel's wallet from him, kissing him languidly as she does so.

"Anyway," she says, pulling back and flinging a ten on the table, which is leaving the waitress a much bigger tip than Gabriel thinks her service merits -- until Elle continues, "I think that waitress is a little smarter than I thought."

Gabriel blinks, struggling to comprehend. "You...want to get a...?" His voice breaks, and he clears his throat, which feels suddenly constricted by the collar of his dress shirt and his tie. "You want to get a room? Like in a hotel?"

"Unless you'd rather get Metaphysical at Mommy's?"

Gabriel is out of the booth and pulling Elle up with him as if he's acquired super speed. "No, but I wouldn't mind getting Metaphysical on Mommy's credit card."

Elle grins wickedly. "Screw the Company -- now you're talking."

* * *

**_A/N: Thanks very much to all who read and reviewed the last chapter. Your feedback and encouragement mean a lot! This time, commenters get to go out for pie with your choice of Gabriel -- the gentleman who orders you your own slice of pie; the romantic who shares one piece and uses the same fork; or the lustful one who doesn't care about pie and just wants to make out. ;)_**

_**Next up...smut. ;)**_


	6. Part VI

**_A/N: Please forgive me for being so long in concluding this story! I got waylaid by the holidays, and ever since then life's been a bit of a whirlwind with very little fanfic time. It meant a lot to mean in the meantime that several of you commented to ask if I was going to finish it, and I hope this chapter is worth the wait. Finally the fic lives up to the sex warning! Though this is an AU fic, I've borrowed the empathic element of Gabriel's power from the show because I love it so much, especially in regard to his relationship with Elle. I've taken some liberties with it, though, to fit the story. The poem quoted in the chapter is John Donne's _The Canonization_, which I hope you'll all read in full if you haven't before, as it's a fantastic poem. Many thanks to the awesome Godricgal for giving this a read-through, as I was a bit panicky about whether the situation (and the sex!) worked! And without further ado, the chapter. :)

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**VI**

"You don't have to seduce me, you know," Elle says, and then sinks her front teeth into the pitted red flesh of a strawberry.

It's just about the sexiest thing Gabriel's ever laid his eyes on, the young woman stretched out on the turned-down sheets and duvet, like a golden-haired angel perched on billowing clouds; glory seems to shine all around her from the light of the bedside lamps. Though Gabriel has to admit that angels are typically depicted strumming harps and singing praise to God rather than sensuously nibbling at fruit and saying, "I was going to sleep with you anyway."

Lounging beside her on the bed, propped up on thick down pillows, Gabriel's voice catches in his throat as he watches her lips find the edge of her champagne flute. He tugs at his collar, loosening his tie as his gaze follows the line of her neck as she tilts her head back to drink...

But Elle doesn't drink. She lowers her glass. Her eyes, crackling blue like her electricity, level on him; her bangs, swept over to one side, reveal a raised eyebrow.

"Unless you're _not_ seducing me," she says. "Are the strawberries and champagne just another charge to the Company? Like the room?"

She's teasing him -- Gabriel recognizes the telltale glint in her eye, the quirk at the corner of her mouth. But there's a tautness in her voice, too, as if she's holding back from him.

With King Midas for a father, Elle is accustomed to the best of everything, and this hotel room, an atrium penthouse suite, is definitely the best Broadway has to offer. But what Elle is _not _accustomed to, Gabriel realizes, is anything being the best _for her_.

The cold, heavy fingers of sadness grip Gabriel's heart and stomach and twist: even as Elle stands boldly before Death, she holds out hope that someone in life will do something good for her, for once, that someone will..._love _her. How pathetically desperate must she be to place that hope in _him_? And yet...that _he _has the chance to make something good...to love...

Does he love Elle?

The grasp on his insides relaxes, leaving Gabriel with the sensation that everything in him has turned to mush, been made new; he is some primordial ooze waiting to take shape, to evolve into a higher form, perhaps, than he has ever wished he could be.

_Do I love Elle_?

He gazes at the young woman in the midnight blue dress, her hair disheveled from his hands running through it, her lips still puffy and flushed from their heated kisses in the diner.

He thinks he _could be_ in love...

The thought makes his neck prickle, his hands sweat, his throat go dry, his heart pound crazily, out of tempo, like a timepiece gone all haywire.

He throws back his glass of champagne, closing his eyes as the fizz bubbles down to his stomach until all goes still and silent within him. Then he sets his glass on the bedside table, rolls to lay on his side, and rests his hand on Elle's hip.

"Maybe the champagne's for me," he says, fortified and mellowed enough by the alcohol and the cool silk of Elle's dress beneath his fingertips to be honest.

"For you?"

"For my nerves," Gabriel quickly amends, as her eyes start to bend. "I feel like it's prom night."

Elle's gaze darts sideways as she drinks her champagne, then returns to his to confess, "I never had a prom night."

"Neither did I." Though his reasons for not having one are slightly more pathetic than Elle having spent her child locked away from the world. "There was a girl I...would have liked to get a hotel room with." His neck prickles, and warmth floods his face. "But girls don't go to prom with the watchmaker's son." Realizing he sounds like he's throwing himself a pity party, he lightens his tone. "Anyway, I could only have afforded the kind of hotel room that charges by the hour. Unlike this..."

"Which charges $49.50 for strawberries and champagne?"

"Exactly," says Gabriel, chuckling softly. He withdraws his hand from Elle's hip and sits up to pour them each a second glass of champagne.

"So this girl you wanted to take to the prom..." Elle says, shifting to recline beside him against the pillows when he returns with their drinks. Gabriel inhales sharply as she sits thigh-to-thigh with him, her dress hitching up high enough as she crosses her stockinged legs that he can see a tantalizing hint of lace at the top, and the gleaming clasp of a garter. Taking a drink, he forces himself to look up at her face, and concentrates very hard on her words.

"Did you memorize poetry for her?"

Face going warm, Gabriel can't meet Elle's laughing eyes, though he does grin as he looks away. "Maybe."

"What poem?" Elle's fingers wrap around Gabriel's tie, pulling him to look at her.

"I can't remember," he answers. It's the truth; he doesn't remember the poetry, doesn't remember the girl's name, doesn't even remember her face. His old high school crush is like a fading dream in the light of the here and now, where Elle's name is the only one whispered over and over in his mind, her lovely face before him, so close he can feel her quick, shallow breaths against his face, the only face he can see, or ever wants to see.

Or kiss.

He leans in and brushes his lips across her cheekbone, feeling, as he lingers against her soft, sweetly perfumed skin, Elle's responding shiver. He chuckles low and nuzzles at her, but her small hand on his chest pushes him back.

"You remember _my _poem, don't you?" she says playfully.

Gabriel leans into her and nips at her earlobe, tasting the salt of her skin and the metallic tang of her earring. "I thought you said I didn't have to seduce you."

"You don't," Elle replies, her shoulder arching up to nudge him away, though the flush of her cheeks, her smile, and her bright eyes belie her. "But you do have to entertain me."

"More like embarrass myself in front of you," Gabriel mutters.

But he takes another fortifying drink, clears his throat, draws a deep breath, turns to Elle, and, before he can psych himself out, blurts:

_"Call's what you will, we are made such by love;_

_Call her one, me another fly,_

_We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,_

_And we in us find th' eagle and the dove._

_The phoenix riddle hath more wit_

_By us; we two being one, are it_--Elle, what the...?"

The last are not the words of John Donne, and they are muffled by Elle's lips as she locks her fingers behind Gabriel's neck, pulling herself against him as she kisses him deeply, without preamble.

"I haven't even gotten to the good parts yet," Gabriel manages to protest between kisses that he thinks might be sparking a little.

"A hot guy's reciting poetry to me in bed in a penthouse suite," Elle replies, her fingers unknotting his tie; she tugs it free of his collar, tosses it aside, and sets to work on the buttons of his shirt. "That is the good part."

Gabriel doesn't argue with her, but allows her to push his shirt off his shoulders and then, when she tugs at the hem, he peels off his own undershirt. Finding her mouth again, he can't help but make low sounds of approval as her hands slide up and down over his bare chest and arms, tracing the contours of his muscles. At one point she breaks the kiss to look at him and giggles girlishly, clearly delighted by what she sees, which at once fills Gabriel with the sensations of adolescent light-headedness and an ego more inflated than any power trip has made him.

"You're pretty buff for a geeky watchmaker," she says.

"I am a supervilliain," Gabriel replies, ducking his head to kiss his way down her neck, which vibrates with her laughter until his tongue finds the hollow of her throat, at which point he feels her indrawn breath and her vocal chords rasping his name. There's a request in the way she says _Gabriel_, a plea -- almost, even, a prayer. It emboldens him to kiss her still lower, and as his lips graze the pale rise of a breast above her satin dress and his hands cup her curves beneath the clinging silken fabric, the sparks fly.

Literally. Gabriel cries out as the electricity jolts his neck, and Elle apologizes, her eyes huge and her flush of passion deepening into embarrassment.

"I was afraid that would happen. I didn't mean to, I swear! Sometimes I just lose control--"

Gabriel silences her with a kiss. "Don't be sorry. I'm starting to like it, you know."

He means it. Though the shock hurt a little at the time, it lingers now as a pleasant tingle through his body, which seems to have made him more alert, heightened his senses to everything there is to see and here and taste and touch and smell about Elle. He rubs his fingers over her breasts, listening to he swish of her dress fabric as he slides his hand along her side. The zipper is cold beneath his fingers as they close around it; he feels each give of the zipper's teeth, releasing the fabric, as he tugs the mechanism downward to reveal that she is not, as he suspected, wearing a bra.

Swallowing hard as he takes in her full round breast in profile, he remembers what undergarments Elle _is _wearing; his fingers abandon stroking the side of her breast to push up the hem of her dress until his fingers are resting on Elle's hot skin above her stockings, tickled by the lace of her garter belt and..._oh God_, she's not wearing any panties, either.

Gabriel is so hungry now, he can't forestall this any longer. He rolls Elle onto her back and positions himself above her, and his anxiety that _she _is ready for this is alleviated when she immediately shimmies out of her dress. She reaches to undo the garter belt, too, but Gabriel stops her with a hand over hers. She grins, wantonly.

"A stocking man, are you?"

"Apparently." It comes out a little more brusquely than Gabriel means it to, but speech is really beyond the realm of his control now, with Elle lying there, all pale skin and pink nipples and black lace and nylon stockings. She is lithe limbs and full curves compacted into a petite body with the power to stop Gabriel's world. He _would _stop it, if he had that power; he knows there could never be any moment more perfect than this one, and he'd like to live in it forever. She's so beautiful, but more than that, she knows what he's done, what he was, and trusts him not to hurt her. For he's sure now that Elle doesn't want to die, whatever she says -- not till she's been loved.

Which is why he hesitates now, not quite trusting himself.

Since her electricity rippled through him, the hunger has been mounting within him. As strong as the desire to settle himself in the cradle of her thighs and bury himself in her warm body is his urge to penetrate her skin and skull and probe the inner workings of her brain until he can find out how she does that...His eyes rake over her body to settle on the scar on her forehead. He pushes back her bangs and, for a long time, stares. The longer he stares, the pale white line begins darkens to pink...then red. Sticky blood red.

Gabriel closes his eyes. He leans over her, brushes a feather-light kiss to the scar. He cannot kiss it away, but he does so as a symbol to her, a symbol to himself, that he won't violate her trust, or his own.

"I'm not a pants woman," says Elle suddenly, and begins to unbuckle his belt, unfasten his pants. Which is the most convincing symbol of all. Gabriel's self-doubts flee as he kicks off the remainder of his clothing and Elle pulls his hips down into hers.

Anxiety returns, momentarily, as he starts to press into her. Elle is so small, he much larger. And it's only been a few days since he threw her through a door, he remembers, noting the purple-rimmed greenish bruises stair-stepping along her ribcage. He doesn't want to hurt her again. But she's kissing him again, sucking at his lower lip, and he swears her tongue sparks when it meets his, so that it's _his _grunt that drowns out Elle's as he pushes inside her.

"Are you trying to kill me?" he asks in the breathless moment afterward, as they lay still and staring at one another, growing accustomed to the feel of their bodies so intimately entwined with another's for the first time.

Slowly, a grin hitches across Elle's face as her lower muscles flex around him, eliciting another groan as he bites his lip to keep from going over the edge before they've even started.

"Only metaphorically," she says, coyly, raking her fingers through his hair and sending more little jolts of electricity through Gabriel's scalp that are slightly stronger than static and strangely therapeutic and invigorating.

He begins to move in her...out of her...and it seems to Gabriel that his old life is passing away and he's being escorted into a heavenly plane of existence by this angel beneath him...around him...Elle's legs wrap around his waist, her heels pressing into the small of his pack, pulling him in deeper still, burying him.

Another jolt passes between her hands and his shoulders, but this time it is Elle who cries out, breaking their kiss to clench her teeth -- Gabriel assumes, to regain control over her powers. Loving the thought that it's _him_ who's making her lose control, he kisses her ear, then whispers that it's okay, he doesn't mind. His own control is slipping -- this is his first time with a woman, after all -- and, sensing that Elle is nearing the edge, too, he draws upon what worked on her earlier, and begins to recite:

"_So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit._

_We die and rise the same, and prove_

_Mysterious by this love._

_"We can die by it, if not live by love,_

_And if unfit for tomb or hearse_

_Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;_

_And if no piece of chronicle we prove,_

_We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;_

_As well a well-wrought urn becomes_

_The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,_

_And by these hymns, all shall approve_

_Us canonized for love..."_

Elle cries out, then, coming with muscles contracting and relaxing around him in a rapid flutter, like the frantic wings of a moth. What carries Gabriel with her is another pulse of electricity that seems to radiate from his core -- though he knows that's ridiculous; it's Elle's power, not his.

But it occurs to him that, joined as they are, two becoming one, her powers _are _his, in a way, just as his are a part of her...

_This _is special, he thinks as he falls, panting, against her, resting his head in the sweat-slicked valley between her breasts, her heart pounding against his ear.

"I'm the only man in the world who's ever had sex like that," he manages to say between gasps for breath. He watches his index finger touch her nipple, as fascinated by the way it hardens, aroused, at his touch as he ever was by the inner workings of a timepiece. Smiling, he pushes up on his elbows to gaze down at her. "Because I'm the only man in the world who's ever had sex with you."

Judging from the small smile that dances across her lips, Elle seems to take this as a compliment. But the grin slips away, and her eyes peer quite seriously at him from beneath her bangs as she says, "If you're talking about the electricity, that wasn't me."

Gabriel slips out of her. "What do you mean, it wasn't you?"

"I know when electricity comes out of me. It didn't that time."

"You could have been distracted. I mean, we were--"

"_I know_," Elle repeats. "It was you."

"But I can't...I don't have..." Gabriel rolls onto his back and flexes his fingers.

Blue sparks crackle and jump between them.

"I'll be damned," Gabriel murmurs, then laughs. "I slept with you, and I got your ability! That's _amazing_, Elle, do you realize what this means?"

Elle holds up her own handful of sparks to mirror his, but stops short of touching their fingers together. "I think I'd prefer you kill people for powers instead of sleeping with everyone in sight."

Though Gabriel chuckles at Elle's characteristically flippant words, he doesn't miss the vulnerability in her eyes -- which he takes as another sign of how far he's come, that he's not so obsessed with this new ability that he loses sight of everything else.

"Don't worry."

He extinguishes his electricity, as much as he'd like to experiment with it, and brushes Elle's tousled, damp hair out of her face, most fascinated with the ability he's cultivating of being able to understand another human being's most intimate emotions.

"It's not the sex...well, not _only_ the sex," he adds, grinning like a schoolboy in a state of mingled pride and disbelieve that he actually just did that, with her. "It's the empathy."

Elle closes her eyes and leans her cheek into his hand as he uncurls his fingers to cup her face. "And what does that mean?"

The words of the poem Gabriel just recited so easily echo in his mind, but his tongue feels suddenly thick and sluggish. He has to answer her, though, and honestly; it would be wrong to withhold his heart from her when he's seen hers.

He moistens his lips, and swallows.

"It means I love you."

His heart hangs, suspended and motionless, in his chest during the eternal moment that Elle stares back at him, silent, unreadable. Then, just as panic is about to set in, she pushes him onto his back and straddles him.

"Then kill me again, Angel of Death."

It's a request Gabriel is only too happy to fulfill.

Again and again.

_The End

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_**A/N: I cannot thank all my readers and reviewers enough for all the support and encouragement you've given me throughout the posting of this fic. Obviously if you comment to this chapter, Gabriel will recite the poem of your choice to you -- in the location of your choice, of course. ;) **_


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